


Paint Smears

by romanticalgirl



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: M/M, Waycest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-04
Updated: 2010-10-04
Packaged: 2017-10-23 11:35:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/249860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/romanticalgirl/pseuds/romanticalgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gerard's drawings are always supposed to belong to Mikey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paint Smears

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [](http://inlovewithnight.livejournal.com/profile)[**inlovewithnight**](http://inlovewithnight.livejournal.com/) for the beta. Someone mentioned this scenario in someone's comments at one time, and I thought it was very important that it be written.

  
Gerard starts drawing when Mikey is five. Which isn’t exactly true, but it’s when the lines and squiggles become something real instead of imaginary creatures and places. That’s not quite true either, because they’re watching _Legend_ , and in shimmering gold crayon, Gerard has drawn him a unicorn that looks real enough that Mikey expects the Lord of Darkness to come through their door.

After that it’s like something’s been set loose, and Gerard draws almost constantly. In the corners and margins of his textbooks, on loose scraps of paper. He copies comics and does caricatures and then he starts his own stuff, horrific and beautiful all at once. Mikey only sees some of it because Gerard is weirdly protective of it in ways he understands, because that’s how Gerard treats him too.

When Mikey’s eleven, Gerard changes. The changes happen before he knows, because his world is made up of Gerard. His world isn’t the crisp colors and chalky air of school or even the warm heavy smell of coffee in the kitchen. It’s certainly not the strange warm, wet wool smell of his room. His world is the smoky yellow light of Gerard’s bedside lamp, the nicotine laced air mixed with waxy oils, and the burnt smell of sharpened pencils.

At fourteen, Gerard moves everything down to the basement, declaring it off limits to the rest of the family, defecting into his own country. Mikey is a stowaway or the resistance leader, defying the rules and pretending he doesn’t see the ‘Do not disturb under penalty of death’ sign on the door. Gerard doesn’t really fight him; the rebellion is raged more against parents than Mikey, and he’s easier to ignore than get rid of. He mostly reads Gerard’s comics – careful to bag and board them after each reading – or watches TV silently, mouthing the words to the movies and episodes he knows by heart.

Besides, at that point, the only criminal thing Gerard is doing is sneaking food downstairs, leaving grease stains and crumbs on his jeans when he wipes his hands on his thighs. And he always shares with Mikey, either because he has good manners or as a bribe, so it isn’t as if Mikey is likely to tell.

At fifteen, it’s cigarettes and adult comics and porn magazines. Mikey doesn’t understand the appeal really. The girls all look the same to him – breasts too large and waists too skinny – but Gerard explains aesthetics to him. Mikey tells him they’re still not attractive, and Gerard says he’ll understand when he gets older. Gerard starts locking the basement door and Mikey leans against it, blocking out the distant outside sounds to just hear Gerard’s ragged breathing.

He pays Roscoe James twenty bucks of comic book money to teach him to pick locks, and sometimes he sneaks in and watches as Gerard looks at the magazines, never the comics - Gerard wouldn’t risk messing up the comics – and touches himself all over his chest and stomach and hips before wrapping his hand around his dick. Mikey always watches silently, observing, learning when Gerard is going to lose control by the hitch in his breath.

Gerard brings a girl home at sixteen and it blows up in his face. She spends time at first asking him about movies and the other girls in their class, and Mikey knows it’s some sort of prank right away. He can’t tell Gerard though, because Gerard has that same look on his face that he has when he looks at the magazines, and at the movies he’s graduated to now. He doesn’t let Mikey watch, but sometimes he gets too caught up in them to notice Mikey’s there, watching the screen part of the time, watching Gerard for most of it.

The girl’s name is Claire, and Gerard’s himself around her – nervous and awkward and sweaty. She moves closer, whispers something, and Gerard tries to kiss her. She slaps him and laughs, insulting him with words Mikey doesn’t know. Gerard stares at her like he’s a kicked puppy, but she just keeps laughing, heading for the door and already talking about telling her friends. She stops when she sees Mikey, just off the stairs in the fall of the shadows. Neither of them says anything, but she doesn’t laugh anymore, doesn’t say anything the rest of the way out of the house.

Mikey slips downstairs and sits next to Gerard on the couch. He reaches for the remote to turn on the TV and flips through the channels until he finds “The Twilight Zone” reruns. They say everything in silence and Gerard lies on the couch, his head in Mikey’s lap. “Draw me a picture, Gee,” Mikey whispers.

Gerard nods, but doesn’t move, eventually falling asleep in Mikey’s lap. Mikey falls asleep too, somewhere between “A Nice Place to Visit” and “Nightmare as a Child,” waking up hours later to static. There’s a blanket over Gerard’s shoulders, falling down over Mikey’s legs and keeping them warm.

**

Mikey starts finding drawings in his bedroom, in his backpack. Headless torsos and disembodied arms, legs in motion and the crosshatch in the faint shape of faces. Some are pencil and others are ink. Some have a sense of finality to them, and still others seem more idea or concept than drawing. They aren’t parts of a whole, nothing fitting when he tries to puzzle piece it all together, though they feel like they’re building toward something. He doesn’t ask when he goes down to the basement, doesn’t try to find the next piece or the secret at the end of it all. Instead they watch movies or play video games or read comics. Occasionally Mikey looks over from the TV screen or up from a book or, less often, his homework, and sees Gerard, hand between his legs, pressing and rubbing through the denim. Mikey can’t ever look away, watching until Gerard swallow a sound and shudders before he even tries to search for where he was and pick up the thread he’d lost in Gerard.

**

One day when Mikey comes home, Gerard and his parents are discussing art school and the future, and none of it makes any sense to Mikey. Gerard moving away, moving on. All of Mikey’s life moves out in expanding ripples from his brother, and without that, there’s no definition, no center to hold.

Gerard sees his face and offers reassurances when they’re lying in the basement on Gerard’s messy bed, room only lit by the ghostly gray light of the TV. There are platitudes and promises – just for a few years, still come home to see him – but art school is a synonym for the outside world, the world that Mikey doesn’t fit into the way he’s supposed to. The world Gerard hides from behind black baggy clothes and too-long, greasy hair.

The pictures are suddenly more defined, more professional. The paper is thicker stock and what used to be sketches are now studies and, instead of watching a movie, they stare at a paused screen while Gerard’s pen or pencil or grease crayon or charcoal fills in lines or shadows. Mikey keeps going when they pause, reciting familiar dialogue until Gerard starts the movie again, and he has to loop back to where they left off.

The drawings aren’t for Mikey anymore. No disembodied parts or sketches of himself in front of the Playstation, lost in destruction. Now they all slide carefully into the slick leather portfolio their parents bought Gerard, tangible proof of his talent. Mikey can’t look through it, can’t see the private scratch of lines wrapped up to go to someone else, stolen away from his own private gallery. Gerard is his. The art is his, promised years ago in a crayon-rendered unicorn.

**

Gerard starts painting, bathing the house in the smell of oil and turpentine. The TV stays silent, the music a barely-audible hum. Mikey watches with resentment, following every sweep of the brush. Gerard paints abstract, but Mikey can see what they are. He can see the dividing lines that make up figures and people, panoramas of color that are a mess to everyone but the two of them. He wants to rage at Gerard and tell him that the world won’t understand him. Instead, he just watches with silent disapproval that he can see slowly hunch Gerard’s shoulders.

Gerard says he’s sorry, but Mikey doesn’t want to hear it, doesn’t want to hear him. It was supposed to be them together, side by side, forever. Instead, Gerard’s leaving home and Mikey’s going nowhere. The same boys and girls and clubs and bands and moments, nothing changing for him while the world opens up before Gerard. He stops talking to anyone, spending his time smoking too many cigarettes in the shadows, making small white marks against the garage, counting down the days to when Gerard’s due to leave.

There’s a party, all the relatives in the dried grass of the back yard, barking at each other through the veil of smoke, ice clinking in glasses as the smell of charred meat chokes the air. There’s a sign someone wrote on an old faded sheet - _Good Luck Gerard!_ in garish colors, burnt orange and ochre. Mikey knows colors the way Gerard does, blending them to make something different altogether.

He’s half drunk and it’s not nearly enough to endure all his aunts and uncles and cousins asking him what he’s going to do with his life. He slips through the house to the basement, ignoring the suitcase standing beside the basement steps.

Gerard’s portfolio is propped against it, zipped up and sleekly black. Mikey wants to kick it, wants to rip it open and tear the pages until they’re nothing more than confetti. Instead, he walks past it. Maybe he’ll claim the basement as his own now, steal it away from Gerard and see if it stings him the same way Mikey’s aching inside. The umbrella light Gerard jerry-rigged to light his workspace is on, and Mikey moves over to it. Violence hums in his hands, and he wants to destroy something, but when he steps into the light, blinking his eyes to see, he has to stop, feeling whatever had been boiling inside him draining away.

Mikey’s never seen Gerard work with a canvas this large, and every inch of it is filled with something, some variation of color, even though the picture itself is a ghost image, a washed-out vision of Mikey leaning against the edge of Gerard’s bed, caught in the light of the television. Mikey knows it’s him – can tell by the long limbs and sharp angles, the pronounced brow and nose – but it doesn’t look like him at all. It looks like he might be, if he were something else, something _more_.

His eyes move up from his own face to the dark figure of Gerard on the mattress, really nothing more than a shadow with dark eyes locked on Mikey, and Mikey realizes that _this_ is how Gerard sees him.

His breath catches in his throat somewhere and he reaches out, unable to keep himself from touching the sticky wetness of the acrylics. It slides smoothly against his fingers as he traces the curve of his arm, the sharp point of his elbow. Titanium white and cadmium red, yellow and green separate and blended in the ridges of his fingertips.

Gerard doesn’t say anything when he touches Mikey’s shoulder. Mikey shivers slightly, turning his head to see the same dark eyes from the painting staring at him. Gerard pulls Mikey’s hand from the painting, the fine edges of Mikey’s arm smeared into the gray light. Mikey looks down at his fingers for a moment and then up at Gerard before he touches him, tracing the curve of his cheek, flesh against flesh.

Gerard’s eyes close and Mikey uses it as an excuse to leave a fine trail of paint over Gerard’s eyelid. He wants to say something, but he’s afraid to shatter whatever this is. Gerard shivers as Mikey’s fingers slide along his jaw and then down his throat. Mikey watches the colors separate and blend, nothing like flesh against Gerard’s skin. Gerard’s lips are parted, his breath faltering against them as Mikey steps back, touching the painting again, this time stealing the gray-blue of his shirt and bringing it up to trace down Gerard’s neck.

Gerard makes a sound that might be Mikey’s name and then he’s moving forward, mouth on Mikey’s. It takes Mikey by surprise, and he stumbles back. The ball of his palms hit the painting as he catches himself on the easel. Paint slides against his hands as Gerard kisses him again, tongue slipping into Mikey’s mouth. Mikey’s lips part easily, hungrily, and he can feel the paint grabbing at his hair, coloring it in the shades of him that Gerard had picked out. He moans softly and Gerard presses closer and Mikey arches into him, legs parting as one of Gerard’s knees pushes between them.

He sees flashes of color behind his eyelids, in the corner of his eye when he has to look, has to watch Gerard’s face from this close, see him magnified and unreal. Gerard’s hands are on the painting as well, coming back and leaving marks on Mikey’s skin that are cool and hot all at once. His head falls back and he can see Gerard’s figure in the painting, black eyes as hot as the fingers of red and black that Gerard is running down his exposed throat. His teeth and tongue trace lines of paint, just outside the colors. Mikey rises up as Gerard’s hand catches at the neckline of his shirt, tugging it down so he can leave the last faint swathes of color on his collar bone.

Mikey catches Gerard’s face, blue and gray fingers framing his pale cheeks, holding him as Mikey kisses him again. Gerard’s hands find Mikey’s hips as Mikey runs his fingers up, threading them into Gerard’s hair, deepening the kiss. He can hear the music drifting in from the party, the sounds of ice and glass, voices rumbling distantly but all he can feel is the press of Gerard’s body, the solidness of _him_ and _them_ , fitting together like they belong.

He’s not sure who makes the first movement, if Gerard thrusts against him or if he grinds forward into Gerard. The wood of the easel creaks and then suddenly it’s skittering away, collapsing on the floor while Mikey stumbles to the wall, Gerard following and tangled in him until they’re pressed together tightly with the black painted sheetrock holding Mikey up. Gerard buries his face against Mikey’s neck, breathing wet and hot on his skin as they rock together. It’s desperate and frantic and _scared_ and Mikey hangs on to Gerard’s hips to keep him from moving away too far, from leaving.

He bends his head and smells the unfamiliar clean of Gerard’s shirt, something their mom washed and ironed for today and noses to the side until he all he breathes is Gerard. Kissing his throat and burying his nose in the familiar swamp of his hair. They’re both breathing hard, making noises as they thrust and grind. The heady smells of paint hang around them as their hips collide and crash, world swirling into color as Mikey feels himself lose control, his orgasm wet and hot against his jeans.

Gerard shivers against him and then goes still, leaning heavily on Mikey. It feels like he’s whispering, but Mikey can’t hear anything over the rush of his blood. Not that it matters. He knows the words, always has. He eases away from Gerard, his lips curving up slightly to stop the frown that creases Gerard’s face as he catches his hand. They head over to the bed, curling up together, holding on in silence as the party goes on without them.  



End file.
